The Clocks at Grand Central Station Are Permanently Wrong

Today is the centennial of Grand Central Terminal, the nation's most iconic -- and certainly its most beautiful -- train station.

One of the most telling features of the station, having spent my fair share of time there, is what one might politely call the place's "flow" and what one might more accurately call the place's TOTAL CRAZINESS: Passengers zoom and zig and zag around each other, briefcases and backpacks and duffel bags and roller bags in tow, via criss-crossed pathways that if charted would probably resemble a Jackson Pollock painting. On the bright side, this explosion of out-of-my-way-I'm-about-to-miss-my-train effusiveness is a wonder of human ergonomics much like the city that surrounds it. On the other hand, it's a chaotic energy guided by social Darwinism and a collective assumption that racing the clock also means racing one's fellow passengers.

There is very little to be done about all this when space is limited, crowds are large, and humans always -- always -- put things off until the last minute. But Grand Central, for years now, has relied on a system meant to mitigate, if not prevent, all the crazy. It is this: The clocks at Grand Central are wrong -- ahead of the actual time by a full minute. This is permanent. It is also purposeful.

The idea is that passengers rushing to catch trains they're about to miss can actually be dangerous -- to themselves, and to each other. That one minute of fastness won't be enough to disconcert passengers too much when they compare it to their own watches or smartphones ... but it is enough, the thinking goes, to buy late-running train-catchers just that liiiiiitle bit of extra time to make them calm down a bit. Fast clocks make for slower passengers. "Instead of yelling for customers to hurry up," the Epoch Times notes, "the conductors instead tell everyone to slow down."

You might call this time-hacking; you might call it behavioral engineering; you might call it comical. Regardless, it seems to be working. Grand Central boasts the fewest slips, trips, and falls of any station in the country -- quite a feat given how many of its floors are made of marble. And how many of the passengers treading those floors are, despite their grace period, cutting it thisthisclose to missing their trains.